There are various safety bumpers and collision sensors adapted to be mounted on automatically moving objects or parts to serve as collision protection. A typical area of application is the safeguarding of pinching and shearing edges in mechanical engineering, in stage machinery, medical technology and on large, heavy gates. They can be also used on automated guided vehicles, or even on domestic and commercial furniture.
For example, a collision sensor might be used to detect if a surface or a part is being collided with or impacted by an obstacle. The sensor might be installed in an automatically movable part of a power driven furniture, such as a chair/sofa or table to detect collision. The automatically movable part refers to a part of furniture or fixture which is not driven manually, and might be driven by a spring mechanism, a hydraulic or pneumatic mechanism, a motor-driven gear or the like, as well known in the art.
In a motor driven furniture, such as a chair/sofa, it is important to prevent the moving part from damaging obstacles or hurting people or pets located nearby. In this regard, a collision sensor is required to signal the motor controller to stop moving when an obstacle is hit. The most commonly used collision sensors are in strip form, but such strip form sensors are expensive and could only detect collision occurred on a relatively small area, such as the edges of the furniture.